Rethinking the Education Mess: A Systems Approach to Education Reform

191 Pages·2013·0.771 MB·English

by  I. Mitroff, L. Hill, C. Alpaslan

Rethinking the Education Mess
DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045
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DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045
Rethinking the
Education Mess: A
Systems Approach to
Education Reform
Ian I. Mitroff
Adjunct Professor, Saybrook University,
San Francisco; Adjunct Professor,
School of Public Health, St. Louis University;
Professor Emeritus, USC, Los Angeles;
President, Mitroff Crisis Management
Lindan B. Hill
Assistant Vice President of the Marian University
Academy for Teaching and Learning; Leadership,
Marian University, Indianapolis, Indiana
Can M. Alpaslan
Associate Professor, College of Business & Economics,
California State University, Northridge
DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045
rethinking the education mess
Copyright © Ian I. Mitroff, Lindan B. Hill, and Can M. Alpaslan, 2013
All rights reserved.
First published in 2013 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN: 978–1–137–38601–4 EPUB
ISBN: 978–1–137–38604–5 PDF
ISBN: 978–1–137–38482–9 Hardback
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
First edition: 2013
www.palgrave.com/pivot
doi: 10.1057/9781137386045
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
Anais Nin
“I do not say ... that schools can solve the problems of pov-
erty, alienation, and family disintegration. But schools can
respond to them. And they can do this because there are
people in them, because these people [sic] are concerned
with more than algebra lessons or modern Japanese his-
tory, and because these people can identify not only one’s
level of competence in algebra but one’s level of rage and
confusion and depression. I am talking here about children
as they really come to us, not children who are invented to
show us how computers may enrich their lives ...” [italics
in original]1
Neil Postman
Note
1 Postman, Neil, The End of Education, Redefining the Value of
Education, Vintage Books, New York, 1995, p. 48.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045
Contents
List of Figures and Tables vii
Preface viii
Outline of the Book xi
About the Authors xiii
1 Introduction: TEM, The Education Mess 1
2 What Is a System and What Is a Mess? 10
3 The Psychology and Philosophy of Inquiry,
Philosophical Psychology, and Psychological
Philosophy 28
4 The Charter School Mess, A Messy
Systems View 49
5 The Charter Schools of the Future—
Possible Designs 61
6 Hiding in Plain Sight: Education
Reform in Indiana 71
7 General Heuristics for Coping with
The Education Mess 87
8 Waiting for Wilberforce—Making Sense of
and Coping with the Tragic and Senseless 101
9 Crisis Management—An Imperative
For Schools 136
Epilogue 156
Bibliography 161
Index 167
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
2.1 The Education Mess—Charters 24
3.1 The Jungian framework 33
4.1 The Jungian framework 51
4.2 Jungian types and special charter schools 52
5.1 Jung and the new generation of teachers 64
5.2 Jung and the old generation of teachers 64
5.3 Jung and unions—the old industrial model 65
5.4 Jung and unions—a modern-day model 65
6.1 The mind trust, part 1 82
6.2 The mind trust, part 2 83
6.3 The mind trust, part 3 83
6.4 The mind trust, part 4 84
6.5 Indiana’s education mess, part 1 84
6.6 Indiana’s education mess, part 2 85
8.1 Jung and school safety/security 104
8.2 Four patterns 106
9.1 How to collaborate 148
Tables
8.1 The two different kinds of statistical errors 109
9.1 Proactive and reactive crisis management
behavior 144
9.2 A crisis typology 145
9.3 Possible ticking time bombs at schools 151
DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045 vii
Preface
This book is about a particular and very important mess:
The Education Mess.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first book to
treat education as a complex, messy system. As such, it
goes entirely against the grain of the vast, overwhelming
majority of books that treat education as if it were noth-
ing but a “machine.” In this view, the component parts of
education not only exist independently of one another,
but as a result, they can be analyzed independently.
As far as we know, Russell Ackoff was the first person
to appropriate the term “mess” to stand for a dynamic,
constantly changing system of problems that are so highly
interconnected and bound together such that they can’t be
separated either in principle, practice, or, most fundamental
of all, in actual fact, i.e., their basic existence. Taking any
problem out of the mess of which it is a part, not only distorts
the basic nature of a problem, but the entire mess as well.
The inescapable conclusion is that one deals with messes as
messes or one has no hope of dealing with them at all.
Education especially calls out for treatment as a “mess”
precisely because that’s not only what education is, but
at the same time, it has not been treated as such. Its very
“messiness” has somewhat paradoxically discouraged its
being treated as a “mess.”
As Ackoff put it:
[People] are not confronted with problems that are independ-
ent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of
complex systems of changing problems that interact with each
other. I call such situations messes. [emphasis in original]
viii DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045
Preface ix
Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis.
Therefore, when a mess, which is a system of problems, is taken apart, [i.e.,
analyzed] it loses its essential properties and so does each of its parts. The
behavior of a mess depends more on how the treatment of its parts interact
than how they act independently of each other. A partial solution to a whole
system of problems is better than whole solutions of each of its parts taken sepa-
rately.1 [emphasis ours]
No matter what one believes its underlying causes are, and therefore
how best to deal with it, many accept the proposition that education is
a mess. Indeed, statements to the effect that education is a mess are not
uncommon. However, once having said this, agreement as to what to do
quickly vanishes. More importantly, as we noted earlier, there are virtu-
ally no in-depth treatments of education as a mess.
The extreme divergence and abject bitterness between different philo-
sophical positions, values, and worldviews about what to do to “‘solve’
The Education Mess” (hereafter referred to as TEM) quickly take over
and dominate the debate. In fact, it quickly becomes apparent that differ-
ent parties don’t see the “same mess” to begin with, let alone whether it’s
“solvable or not.” Even more basic, virtually no one except Ackoff goes
beyond using the word “mess” in any but the most pejorative and depre-
cating manner of speech. Presumably, once something has been labeled
a mess, little if anything can be done about it. Apparently, the only thing
one can do is to throw up one’s hands and slink away.
This book not only shows how to represent, and thereby, better under-
stand, TEM as a mess, but it also provides key heuristics for coping with
it. We not only show how and why education is a mess, but as a result,
why it does not have nice, neat, and exact solutions like the more often
than not simple and misleading exercises that are typically found at the
end of most texts. In fact, we show that the processes of “representing”
and “coping with” messes are not independent activities.
One of the most powerful ways of understanding messes is through
our coping with and attempting to manage them. Often, it is the only
way of understanding them. Only exercises offer a complete definition
of the problem prior to our working on them. In contrast, a definition
of a mess only emerges, if then, through the process of working on and
attempting to manage it. As opposed to exercises, the order of definition
is completely reversed with regard to messes. But since people are gener-
ally miseducated through a long process of being fed exercises, they are
generally thrown for a complete loss if they are not given a precise and
DOI: 10.1057/9781137386045